dbf

dbf reads dBASE databases and prints the content to the display or converts it to *.csv (comma-separated) files which can be opened in Excel, StarOffice, and most other spread sheets. dbf can also be used to show some statistics about the content.

dbf is very easy to handle. The look-a-like orientates much on the command-line client of MySQL. Although the commands are quite different from the MySQL command-line tool (and the fact that dbf is missing an interactive command shell), every user could learn very fast how to convert the dBASE files to CSV, SQL instruction sets or printing the content to screen.

One of dbf's goals is the multi-platform-/multi-architecture support. Most dBASE applications are developed for Windows running on x86-architectures.

With dbf you get support for dBASE also on UNIX, Linux, BSD, MacOS X and several other platforms. dbf is as portable as possible, so that it runs on Intel-based architectures (x86), PowerPC and Alpha/RISC architectures. Check out the system requirement pages and see on how many platforms dbf was ported to until today.

With dbf 0.7 a lot of performance improvements were done on this small tool. The export in one of the two export formats is done in a few seconds (depending on the size of your data sets) and that is also true for older, slower systems.

CSV is a special file format, where all data-sets are separated by a comma or another user-defined sign. All common spread sheets, like Excel, OpenOffice (StarOffice) Calc, Softmaker Office and many more, support this format. It is very easy to import CSV-files to such spread sheets and to work on this imported data sets. With version 0.7, dbf supports also a way to define your own separator for the exported CSV file. dbf 0.7 orientates completely on the CSV standard.

The newest versions of dbf also support SQL as export file format. As result you get a file with a complete set of SQL statements. All you have to do is to copy the lines (or importing the file) into an administrative client. And it is very easy: The filename of the SQL instruction set will be also the name of the database you want to import the data.